Mozilla, which bowed to the market power of the H.264 video compression technology last year, now has built support for the patent-encumbered standard into the Nightly version of Firefox on Windows 7.

Mozilla can't actually ship H.264 in its open-source product because of the patent licensing requirements, so it decided instead to adapt Firefox to draw on H.264 support built into newer operating systems. The first step is done -- if not fully tested and debugged -- on Windows 7, according to a Mozilla blog post today.

Part of H.264's clout stems from power-efficient decoding enabled by chips in just about every smartphone on the market today. On personal computers, Adobe Systems' Flash Player often handles video decoding, but it's barred from iOS.

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Perhaps Mozilla will get its revenge through WebRTC, a nascent standard for real-time video or audio chat on the Web. The new Nightly version also has WebRTC support enabled by default. It's not clear what codec WebRTC-based video chat will use, but it's possible VP8 could be specified as mandatory to implement for the standard. A March showdown over WebRTC video could settle the matter, but it's also possible no codec at all will be specified, which is what happened with HTML video built into Web pages.

WebRTC faces a big challenge in the form of Microsoft, which prefers a lower-level approach it calls CU-RTC-Web. Microsoft believes WebRTC is difficult to implement, but one of its interoperability criticisms was made obsolete with the arrival of Chrome and Firefox that can communicate using WebRTC.

About the author

Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and covers browsers, Web development, digital photography and new technology. In the past he has been CNET's beat reporter for Google, Yahoo, Linux, open-source software, servers and supercomputers. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces.
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